Ahhh… spring break!  A chance to get a reprieve from school, from homework, and from our regular schedule.  I was determined to make spring break fun for the girls this year, rather than just letting everyone sit around like slobs doing nothing.  (Or rather, allowing myself to just sit around like a slob doing nothing.  Which is my inclination, especially if I’ve got an unread book on my Kindle.)

We began by sending the girls off to spend a few days with my parents… allowing me to be a slob.  Not really, y’all!  With a few days of blissful silence around our house, I was able to do some writing and have two more books nearly finished.  Now, I have to decide which one comes out next.  Hmm… do you want to read Marie’s story or Rachel’s story?  You’ll have to let me know!

When I wasn’t writing, I was helping Wes cut apart a tree…

And by helping, I mean that I was doing the rest of the yard work and checking periodically to make sure he hadn’t fallen off that ladder.   (The tree looks so much better now.  It was really starting to get out of hand.)

I also finally organized my closet the way I wanted it.  Finally.  Almost two years into life in this house.  We can never move from Pasadena now.

Once the girls got home, the fun finally started.  I took them to the park in the mornings, where they exhausted themselves (and me!) on the playground…

That night was our first night at the rodeo.

Wednesday nights were $10 tickets, and they were worth every penny, as Emma finally got to the rodeo and finally beheld the awesomeness of the cinnamon rolls they have there…

I have a whole montage of pictures of Emma enjoying the cinnamon rolls, y’all.  Ana enjoyed them, too, but she wasn’t quite as demonstrative as Em was about it.

I was so excited that the girls were going to get the whole rodeo experience that night when Ana coolly informed me that, “This isn’t my first rodeo.”  Ha!  And she was right!  They’d been to the Pasadena Rodeo before, but this one was just a teeny tiny bit bigger.  They were baffled by pretty much all of the events and couldn’t seem to understand WHY anyone would sign up to ride a bull.  Me neither.  But it makes for good entertainment.  They especially enjoyed the calf scramble and declared that they’re going to be in FFA one day so they can chase a calf around the arena. 

Awesome.

It was a late night that concluded with a Jake Owen concert.  This was their first concert to ever attend, and they were pretty overwhelmed by it all.  So much so that we had to carry their sleepy selves into the house after we finally got home.

The next day, we had a lunch date with the senior adult ladies from the church.  I’m always glad when the girls have a break from school and can join us on outings like this because as much as the ladies in our church like Wes, they seem to like him ten times better when he has two pretty little girls with him.  They helped to provide some entertainment at lunch, especially when Emma requested some biscuits and got this…

She couldn’t eat them all, obviously.

The girls helped me run some errands around town…

… then we came home and started a puzzle together….

…. that we finished really fast!

They’ve grown up a lot since the days of those eight piece wooden animal puzzles that made noises.  I was amazed.  (And Ana still looks a little sleepy from the night before, huh?)

No matter, though, because we spent ALL of the next day at the rodeo, thanks to some tickets given to us by some church friends.  Once we got to the rodeo (after some parking nightmares), we went by the barn to visit my cousin and his family and the cows they’d brought down from East Texas to show.  I wasn’t there two minutes before this happened…

Oh, well.  I’m a mother — I’ve had worse.

From there, we went back to the rodeo, where the seats were so much better than our $10 seats from earlier in the week…

The girls got to see Keith Urban in concert and have declared themselves big fans now.

We concluded spring break with a long run for Mommy, bike rides for the whole family, and a medical clinic for all of our stuffed animals that have ripped seams and boo boos…

Just call me Doc McStuffins.  (And it was the stuffed German Shepherd that I stitched up.  Not the gigantic, real German Shepherd.)

I hope we gave them a fun spring break!